Ah, I can get outside the building without leaving my computer! I still think talking to actual people is more informing, because they'll often indicate secondary or even completely irrelevant information that is more important. An experiment will mainly either confirm or disprove an existing hypothesis (though you may still get some info by asking for feedback etc - just much less, and less often, than from a live conversation). In summary: personal contact helps (said to be a comparative advantage of SV).
Can people really lauch several mini-webapps over lunch? I guess if you have rails hosting setup and know your way round a domain name registrar, and practice this a few times, you really could get that fast (for, of course, simple webapps, like isitdownforeveryoneorjustme, or isitfriday etc). Payment setup might be more hassle... but I guess if you have set up paypal once, it's not hard to repeat. There are also various 3rd party services (like Wufoo/google forms, fax, recurring charges, etc) and APIs. Though you couldn't learn them all and use them several times over lunch, after a little practice you could (maybe just one use is enough).
Who cares what you call yourself? An entrepreneur by any other name etc. It only matters when you have to impress people, in a courtly procotol sense.
Can people really lauch several mini-webapps over lunch? I guess if you have rails hosting setup and know your way round a domain name registrar, and practice this a few times, you really could get that fast (for, of course, simple webapps, like isitdownforeveryoneorjustme, or isitfriday etc). Payment setup might be more hassle... but I guess if you have set up paypal once, it's not hard to repeat. There are also various 3rd party services (like Wufoo/google forms, fax, recurring charges, etc) and APIs. Though you couldn't learn them all and use them several times over lunch, after a little practice you could (maybe just one use is enough).
Who cares what you call yourself? An entrepreneur by any other name etc. It only matters when you have to impress people, in a courtly procotol sense.